We recently visited her home in Maharashtra for Pola Festival in August, when farmers honour their bullocks before the season’s first day of ploughing.

This festival, the Moo Party, is quite a spectacle!

Kaveri is a milk maid. In the mornings she milks the cows and tends to a myriad housewifely duties. From 11am until 5.30pm she grazes the cows in the fields.

During the Pola Festival, bullocks are bathed by their owners, then decorated with vibrant paint and an ornamental shawl. Finally they are worshipped and paraded through town to show off their colours. The procession is often accompanied by the music of drums and bugles.

These two men specialise in buffalo milk, while Kaveri’s family specialise in cow milk.

Here the two bullocks are bowing before a statue of Hanuman at the local temple outside the village gates.

This is Kaveri’s father-in-law, the farmer.

This is Kaveri’s son Adita with his grandpa and two new bullocks.

Kaveri’s mother-in-law with her baby niece.

And two more babies – calves on the farm, decorated for Pola Festival.